Starting a new business is never easy. There are just so many things to juggle: bills to pay, vendors to deal with, staff to manage and giant robots to fend off. Well that last part maybe not so much, but for the Middle Manager of Justice, sending off his contract superheroes to battle strange villains and keep the streets safe is just as important as filing those 1099 forms.

Middle Manager of Justice takes a lot of it cues from your typical Kairosoft time management game. You run the daily goings on of a for-hire superhero company. It’s your job to hire new heroes, train them, motivate them, keep them happy, and send them out into the city to stop crimes, protect the public and figure out what nefarious evil-doer is behind these attacks.

“Let’s solve the mystery of who ate my potato salad out of the company fridge!”

The crimes you need to solve are listed on a map with a timer counting down. The faster you deal with them, the greater the rewards. Jobs can be anything from taking down thugs, rescuing damsels in distress, stopping runaway buses full of screaming kids or taking down mad scientists hatching dastardly schemes. Completing missions gets you gold for buying new equipment and expanding your office, experience points for levelling up your heroes, and Supremeium points which are used to train your heroes and hire better, more experienced employees. You also have certain objectives to obtain which are listed on a clipboard, and completing these tasks gets you awards as well.

Your heroes all have different abilities and special abilities (our personal favorite being the Butt Smash) which all add to the strategy of taking on the bad guys. Some heroes are better at hand to hand combat, while others are good at long range attacks. As your heroes level up (or get promoted) you can train them and enhance their health or power or make their special abilities more powerful.

We don’t need no education.

When you send your heroes out on a mission, the screen goes into ‘Hero Cam’ mode and you watch the battles unfold. During the fight you can activate their special powers, or use special battle enhancing items. Your office manager can even get in on the action by motivating the heroes with a ‘You can do it’ rah-rah cheer, causing them to be more effective in battle. You can do more than one mission at a time by ‘delegating’ and sending separate heroes out on separate missions. These delegated missions can’t be viewed, but the ability to do more than one thing at once really speeds things up. Completing missions on a timely basis makes the citizens happy and happier citizens give you more gold, which you have to collect. A hero’s life isn’t easy, but it can be less stressful and rewarding with efficient time management.

The game does a pretty good job of walking that fine line between being a freemium game and a paid game. You gain gold and experience at a pretty good clip so upgrading your office and buying new equipment can be done without too much of a problem. You’re able to move throughout the game without worrying too much about doing a lot of grinding to get the things you need.

“Leave everything to me!”

The dreaded paywall hits you when it comes to Superium points. These are used to rush the training and hiring of your heroes. Unfortunately you rarely get enough points to do both of these at a decent speed, so sometimes you’re faced with a choice: “Do I rush the training of my flame throwing hothead, or do I sign the contract for that brand new cyborg and wait the 30 minutes for my other hero to finish her boxing lessons?” The obvious way around this is to spend real money for points. We actually managed to go through the game without spending any money, but we just concentrated on powering up our original heroes without buying any of the higher tiered ones.

Middle Manager of Justice is a surprising amount of fun. It’s got a charming, humorous sense of style and the gameplay, while very repetitious, is incredibly addictive. The micromanaging of literally every aspect of the office and upgrading your heroes and keeping track of the objectives you need to complete might be overwhelming for some, but after you start playing you’re going to see just how much fun running an office of super-powered misfits can be.

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